The Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative establishes partnerships with commercial cloud service providers (CSPs) to reduce economic and technological barriers to accessing and computing on large biomedical data sets to accelerate biomedical advances. A central tenet of the STRIDES Initiative is that data made available through these partnerships will incorporate standards endorsed by the biomedical research community to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). Stylized cloud image with interconnected nodes representing cloud computingThe STRIDES Initiative will help to address the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science goals to modernize the biomedical data ecosystem and support storage and sharing of individual datasets by testing and assessing models of cloud infrastructure for NIH-funded data sets and repositories. Through the partnerships established by the STRIDES Initiative, CSPs will work directly with the NIH and its funded investigators to develop and test new ways to make large data sets and associated computational tools available and accessible by wider audiences. CSPs and investigators of the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase will set up cloud storage and services for the three test case data sets used to develop principles, policies, and processes for the Data Commons. Services are expected to become available to the NIH-supported community after a series of pilot programs to refine policies and procedures for the initiative.